Google Blogger Housecleaning

    Writing kind of a trivial post today.  At least, it's trivial in the large scheme of things.  It was a big deal for me, anyway.  :^)

    Back in January when the idea of starting Grace Notes back up was gaining momentum, there was a huge speed bump that just about shut things down before it even had a chance to start.  The "cookie consent" situation.  There were a log of changes to manage, new things to learn.  Last time I was paying (a lot!) for hosting and using Wordpress.  This time we're taking the budget express.  Google Blogger is free, and you can have a BUNCH of blogs if you really want to.  I forget how much Google charged for the URL, but seems like it was $13 or $15 for a year.

    The URL name is a compromise.  It's not the original one for Grace Notes, but it is my overarching URL ever since Galaxy Quest came out.  Crewman6 was the redshirt who lived, and it's always been an inspirational name for me.  Lastly, I'm paying $12 per month for Google Office.  That gives me a custom email, more storage for whatever files I use on the blog.  Some other benefits I haven't looked into yet.  Pretty much, this is everything I need to manage Grace Notes.  WordPress was a great blogging platform, and was more versatile than Blogger.  But it was a heck of a lot more expensive to maintain, and the hosting company just kept leapfrogging the rates up every year.

    At some point I'll turn Adsense on, but it's not a big goal here.  Grace Notes cost much more to maintain than it every made me last time around.  If it can pay that $12 per month fee, I'll call it a successful hobby and enjoy it.

    Now we get to today's subject.  To properly manage the cookie consent requirements, I had to paste some code into the Blogger theme.  I also pasted in some custom lines for a couple of features that weren't easily available on Blogger.  Not really a skill of mine, but I did manage to follow a couple of guides.  Afterward, the initial menus for Theme management were gone.  There was a comment about some features not being available now.  I took that to mean I could no longer change the advanced features of my theme, without reloading the base version, making my changes, then re-inserting whatever custom codes needed to be done manually.  For a few months I looked for other theme templates off-Blogger, but didn't find any that seemed worth changing the whole blog for.

     With that in mind, I've been leaving a lot of 'tidying up' undone for months.  Mainly the link colors, and making a custom Banner. Woke up this morning, and it felt like today was the day to finally fix all that.  Found some websites that gave pointers on changing the link colors and sat down to puzzle them out.  The first one wanted me to start off on the Theme tab.  As usual, the first line read "Theme Preview is currently unavailable."

   

    If you're familiar with Blogger, at this point you've probably realized I've been mistaken this whole time.  The ability to customize my theme was always there.  As was the Advanced options.  Maybe something changed, maybe I just read it wrong.  I was clicking the down-arrow on the orange button to get the drop-down menu.  Took me ages to realize I just had to click on the orange button ON THE WORD "Customize!!" Now that I know, fixing the link colors was very easy.  

    It was a bit of work to get the banner done, but at least it was legitimate work, not a figment of my own imagination.  My previous keyboard was a Yamaha DG-640, and was a grayish-silver color.  That worked really well against the black background of the blog screen.  The Hammer 88 was more difficult.  A black body on a black background didn't stand out a lot.  I played with it a lot, even tried to use an external image for the background, but it didn't come out perfect.  It will stand for now, I do like it a lot.  But some day in the future, I'd like to have better lighting set up so that the keys will be a clean white. Today's lighting was partly sunlight from a window, partly incandescent bulbs from a ceiling fan light, and the keys aren't consistently white.

    It's been a learning process, and a matter of finding the right software all over the internet.  I started with PixLR, used Irfanview, and tried several online tools before getting something that worked.  At the moment, I'm calling it a day, and an improved banner will have to be a project for another day.

Grace Notes - Restoring A Lost Website

 So far, these updates have been more 'talk' than 'update'.  I write them for people to read if they want, but mainly to help me not lose the memories.  Eventually I'll start building the "real" pages, with the music.  For now,  just documenting the process so the memory won't be lost.  Between getting older, and losing a great deal of cognition and memory from Covid, forgetting everything important is a huge fear of mine.  So this is something of a journal for me, as well as a record of progress on the blog.

Even back in 2011, when "Grace Notes" was still just wishful thinking, one of it's main purposes was to exercise my memory.  Playing an instrument, learning new songs to play, are supposed to be good for memory.  Making a blog about it felt like a natural extension of the plan.  

After about 10 years, I let the project drop.  It was taking drastically more effort and more time, to learn new songs and arrangements.  Meanwhile, the hosting cost kept shamelessly rising year by year, until I got discouraged and quit.  Eventually funding the hosting company became money I couldn't afford to spend, on a project that never really earned it's keep.  The backup copy made before shutting the site down... disappeared.  The website was gone, all the research and writing was gone.  Recreating the site without the writing, or even my notes, felt like too much of a time sink.

In the middle of all that, my digital grand, the Yamaha DG-640, bit the dust.  Not all at once, but key by key, until it was unusable.  Talked to a repair tech, who told me that the control boards on Yamaha digital grands went brittle after a few years.  Repairs are pointless, because they won't stay repaired.  He convinced me it was cheaper to replace the keyboard.  That's still a lot of money, and it took a while, but now I'm using an M-Audio Hammer 88.  Not really a digital piano, it's more accurately a Midi controller.  It came with Ableton Live 10 Lite.

There were a lot of road blocks along the way, but everything is finally converging.  It took, among other things, getting a dedicated laptop computer to run Ableton.  It also took a lot of time learning a bare minimum to use Ableton.  It was too much complexity for my needs.  Finally everything is working right, and I know exactly how to get my playing from keyboard to Youtube.

Additionally, Monique recently discovered a partial backup of Grace Notes, on the Wayback Machine. It's not complete, but at least I have access to a huge amount of the original site.  I'm nearly done backing all of those pages up onto a hard drive.  Once that's done, there's only one major hurdle left... Adsense.

As best I can tell, my Adsense account is still active.  I'd like to eventually use it on this blog, but google hates plagiarism.  Even when I'm re-creating my own website, with my own original writing.  There doesn't seem to be a sure-fire safe way to put my old pages on this new blog, without being penalized.  The only option is to re-write everything, with enough changes to count as completely original work.

At least now, I have the original text.  Still time-consuming but better than re-writing it blindly, not knowing if it's different enough.  When I've backed up all the pages that WayBack archived, I'll start bringing back the old(new) pages.

Additionally, I'd like to create and record new arrangements, moving forward with brand new content.  That's the part I'm excited about.  Having fewer "progress reports", and more focus on real content.  Fingers crossed, it won't be long now!!